13
Silence in the Churches
In September the twin towers fell. I’d never heard of them until they were
gone. Then I watched as planes sank into them, and I stared, bewildered, at
the TV as the unimaginably tall structures swayed, then buckled. Dad stood
next to me. He’d come in from the junkyard to watch. He said nothing. That
evening he read aloud from the Bible, familiar passages from Isaiah, Luke,
and the Book of Revelation, about wars and rumors of wars.
Three days later, when she was nineteen, Audrey was married—to
Benjamin, a blond-haired farm boy she’d met waitressing in town. The
wedding was solemn. Dad had prayed and received a revelation: “There will
be a conflict, a final struggle for the Holy Land,” he’d said. “My sons will be
sent to war. Some of them will not come home.”
I’d been avoiding Shawn since the night in the bathroom. He’d apologized.
He’d come into my room an hour later, his eyes glassy, his voice croaking,
and asked me to forgive him. I’d said that I would, that I already had. But I
hadn’t.
At Audrey’s wedding, seeing my brothers in their suits, those black
uniforms, my rage turned to fear, of some predetermined loss, and I forgave
Shawn. It was easy to forgive: after all, it was the End of the World.
For a month I lived as if holding my breath. Then there was no draft, no
further attacks. The skies didn’t darken, the moon didn’t turn to blood. There
were distant rumblings of war but life on the mountain remained unchanged.
Dad said we should stay vigilant, but by winter my attention had shifted back
to the trifling dramas of my own life.
I was fifteen and I felt it, felt the race I was running with time. My body
was changing, bloating, swelling, stretching, bulging. I wished it would stop,
but it seemed my body was no longer mine. It belonged to itself now, and
cared not at all how I felt about these strange alterations, about whether I
wanted to stop being a child, and become something else.